A quick hit this week, folks, on a couple of my favorite sites for finding free fiction -- and nonfiction -- online.

I may have mentioned at one time or another that I'm a big sci-fi/fantasy/horror fan and there are a couple of great sites online for finding free genre fic that I think bear mentioning here. Obviously, the quality of the documents may vary; some of them are just vanilla html for reading online; some are fully downloadable ebooks and then there's the stuff in between. And if you've got suggestions for other sites -- places to find good nonfiction, travel writing, literary fiction, poetry, or plays online -- let us know about them in the comments!

The first one I want to point out is SF Signal which does a weekly round-up of "Free Fiction." Here's the link to their most recent list. They cover everything from magazines to audio books -- note the two available from Tor where you can get an audio and a text version! -- and pretty much anything else that crosses their desk. SF Signal also does great roundups of genre news, articles, opinion pieces, movie reviews, interviews, etc., etc. There's no registration required to get to any of this content on SF Signal; they don't get into the requirements of the sites to which they link, though, so be prepared for that and you can follow the site via RSS feed, Twitter, or Facebook.

My other suggestion would be, in fact, Tor.com. Tor is one of my favorite "new" (-ish; I think they're actually a couple of years old at this point) genre blogs. Yes, they're run by Tor Macmillan, a publishing company, and therefore have the odd commercial axe to grind but they're mostly very upfront about that sort of thing and they have some really awesome people blogging for them. The site itself is worth checking out just for that alone.

But, if you follow the blog regularly, or even just pop in now and then and search for an author name, you can come across some great free fiction. Late last year, for example, they put up several stories from their Year's Best Fantasy anthology online. That's the link to the first post with the first batch of stories; if you browse forward through the site, you'll find the others. You have to register at the site to view the stories (this is true for quite a bit of their free stuff), but it's a free registration and very uninvasive in terms of being nagged by the site to do, buy, or look at things afterwards. Tor's also pretty generous about throwing up free chapters or previews from a lot of their books, or linking to sites that do.